c-span q&a interview transcript: Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (link)

KWIATKOSKI: Well, I finally left in May - I’m sorry, in March of 2003, but it was in May of 2002 that I was moved from Sub-Saharan African Affairs into Near East-South Asia, and that’s really when my eyes began to be opened about how our policy towards invading, destroying and occupying Iraq, although I’m not sure if that’s the right order, but I began to be aware of something else that was going on, which was very, very different from what I had seen in the previous 19 years, and I think that’s really - you know, when you have a shock, when suddenly you have a veil pulled away and you see something - and it was inconsistent with my values as a military officer.

You know, we sort of noticed it pulled the Constitution. We have a sense that the people in the Pentagon will be very apolitical. Certainly, the political bosses reflect any administration, the administration that places them there, and that’s fine. But, I saw a type of politicization almost from the very first week in Near East-South Asia policy, which really violated the idea of an apolitical military. This was an agenda-setting organization, and the agenda was war. The agenda was an invasion of Iraq. I’m not sure the agenda was nation-building in Iraq. We did very little planning. There was very little that emanated from the Pentagon in any practical way that would have prepared us for what came after toppling Saddam Hussein. But, certainly the agenda amongst the political appointees there, almost a little nest of very ideologically motivated folks.

And neo-conservatism is a word that we’ve all come to know and not necessarily love, but neo-conservatism is a part of that. The neo-conservative agenda preceded George Bush’s presidency. Certainly the plans of it were envisioned by neo-conservatives for Iraq, had been talked about for many, many years, and these plans included his destruction and a changing of Iraq, a transformation somehow of that country.